Rubble
by Necessary Chocolate
Summary: She crawled as Betty but ran as Bubblegum. Princess Bubblegum-centric. Theory.
1. Forward

Author's Note: This is my headcanon. :) I think that a mutated Betty turned into Bubblegum, which is what this whole story centers on.  
>There will be five chapters. Critique? Ideas for future stories?<p>

_**Warnings:**_ Dark. Sort of.  
>Apocalypse kind of thing going on.<br>Some out-of-characterness for Bubblegum because you know, with this theory...  
>Bombs. Mentions of deathpain.

I don't own characters or poem.

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><p><em>Cold winter night<em>  
><em> Star-fed sky, reaching upward<em>  
><em> Like stairs, we climb<em>  
><em> To a higher place–<em>  
><em> Beyond where we normally go<em>  
><em>-Don Iannone<em>

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><p>Betty walks out of the rubble but crawls through the streets. Her legs hardly carry her anymore. She's never hurt so much, never felt so utterly sick. The snow falls around her and her hands are freezing through her soaked gloves, but she makes no move to stand. She wants to just let herself fall, to stop crawling, to stop trying, because it's finally happened.<p>

They've dropped the bombs.

After so many years of school with terrified teachers and students at the prospect of war, it's finally happened. Betty never believed it when she was in school. She got worried when someone brought up the tension or how many bombs they had or have, but the idea seemed too far-fetched, too otherworldly to actually happen. The last bomb drop that she learned about had a horrible aftermath. How many had they dropped this time, here?

Betty keeps crawling. She'd been in the basement with all that stupid candy when it hit, thinking of Simon and wondering where he is now, and worrying about the horrible weather they'd been having over the past year or so. Above her, people were working happily with the machines, making the candy and stealing bits of it when they wanted to. Her sister was up there, laughing and dancing with her boyfriend during break, and then everything hit and everything went to hell.

She was kept downstairs with the candy and everyone else down there for hours, not realizing that the bombs weren't an air burst, that they _hit_, that they were all still in danger.

Betty knows she's a strong person. Her parents were never around and she had to take care of herself. She'd grown up knowing that. She's a survivor. So she keeps crawling.

Candy sticks to her – she has no idea how or why it's still there, clinging to her skin and hair. She doesn't remember much, all she remembers is her sister laughing, saying that she'd be back sometime later, the huge boom and the workers running downstairs to find Betty, standing terrified at the stairs with a few other workers. She remembers her decision to look for survivors, to get them to safety, to try and find something more (really, she was looking for her sister). She remembers everyone begging her to stay and pushing past the rubble to walk outside.

She could've been down there for hours or for minutes. Or for days. Moments. Years. She doesn't know.

She remembers falling to her knees and struggling to keep going.

Right now, she's still crawling, searching through layers of snow and ice for her sister – snow and ice that couldn't've been there if she'd only been in the basement for a few hours. Every inch of her is in pain, every vein screaming. Her stomach tumbles around and twice she's vomited. Her head feels like nails are being driven into it and ripped out with rusty nail removers. Her skin feels on fire and she desperately wants to stop, to give up. It wouldn't be so bad, to quit and just die.

Maybe Simon's dead. Maybe in heaven Simon isn't crazy. Maybe in heaven Simon was still himself, maybe he still loved her, maybe her sister was dead and there too. Betty's thoughts are twisted and tangled together, but still, she crawls forward.


	2. Finding

Some point later, Betty knows she's a mutant. It's been weeks of searching, months of unbearable pain, and no one who went out into the radiation so early should be able to be living and breathing. Her hands were never even frostbitten, even with all the snow and cold. She's a survivor.

And now she's survived being mutated.

She wakes up one late evening with the sun just setting and Betty struggles to her feet and faces the sun. Something is missing. It feels like there's a gap, a hole, nothing where something – _anything_ – should be. And then it hits her. Her skin's not on fire anymore. It doesn't feel as if she could tear her own skin off. Her skin still prickles uncomfortably, but the mind-numbing pain doesn't exist anymore.

Awestruck, Betty peels off her jacket despite the cold air and runs one hand across the skin of the opposite arm. Immediately, she freezes, torn between being amazed and horrified.

Her skin is _sticky_.

Not enough for her skin to come off at her finger's touch, but enough that she can feel it. She feels an urge to run to the nearest science facility to observe herself and what the radiation did to her skin. Her head still pounds, her stomach still tumbles around, but her skin doesn't burn and it's sticky now.

Betty unconsciously checks her hair, too, and is amazed to find it sticky, too, and no longer in strands. It's all clumped together and it reminds her of those old cartoons where hair seems more like a helmet than hair. She pulls a clump out and stares, shocked and amazed and a little terrified, too, at the bright pink clump of something in her hands.

She lifts it to her nose and sniffs it. It smells sweet, like candy, and Betty wonders if the candy that stuck to her as she wandered through the radiation-soaked rubble caused this.

Looking to the sun, Betty ponders this until the sun is long gone. She eats some corn from cans she'd discovered a while back, and stands there, thinking until the novelty wears off and she's not as terrified. This world – unless it was only her country attacked – would no longer have as many scientists as it should.

She has to find survivors.


	3. Flow

Betty doesn't know how many years it's been. She only knows that she's met living candy, sentient fire, demons, talking wolves, stretchy animals and some seriously weird creations since she began her search for survivors. None of those she's close to know her real name, they only know her as 'Princess'. A few add 'Bubblegum' to the end of it, and Betty doesn't complain or correct them. It's still a little hard to correct a giant, sentient candy cane. (Or maybe she just shrunk.)

All she knows is that she's been led to an island in her search for surviving doctors and scientists. She doesn't really want her candy-esque body cured anymore, but she still wants to find more. She can't be the only scientist left on the planet. She wasn't the only human left, though many of them have gone into hiding.

Betty doesn't ask what the island is called and no one offers a name. But a human, another mutant, one mixed with what looks like fish DNA, leads her to it, saying it's his homeland and he knows there are still scientists on it.

"I know there has to be." He says quietly when she doesn't answer. "What you expecting here, Princess?"

She blinks and looks at him. He's old, weak, thin and frail, but he's a survivor, just like her, and he was kind enough to take her to this island on his boat. "Something more." She states simply.

He nods like he knows what she means. "My ma's probably dead… The bombs hit out here too, even my homeland wasn't spared…"

Betty wants to hit him suddenly. She wants to stroll across the boat and deck him. Because _her_ homeland got hit, and here this man is, acting like he's amazed they hit the island because it was _his_ homeland. Betty reminds herself that it's a small island off the coast of what used to be North America, why _would_ they target such a small island? And the anger vanishes as quickly as her old life did those years ago.

Everywhere has been hit. The sentient candy/fire and the demons – those who've just come to life now call it the Great Mushroom War. Betty, and any other human, doesn't feel like correcting them. The name is very fitting, anyways, for all the mushroom clouds that formed during those times.

The boat ride lasts a month, and the man keeps telling stories. He asks about her life, but Betty doesn't want to share. She doesn't want to forget those times, but remembering those times hurts too much to keep thinking of them. The time before the world fell to pieces and rubble rained for days. She thinks of Simon often, wondering if he lived and if he's safe. She left him after the screaming and nonsense he spouted (that doesn't seem so nonsensical now that she thinks about it) but she still loves him. She misses him, too, desperately. She wants him with her, searching for survivors with her.

She shouldn't have left him.

But it doesn't make much of a difference now.

"How much longer?" She asks.

The man blinks a few times. "Should only be a couple of hours now."

"I'm going to go to sleep." She walks back to her room, her heart pounding at the memory of Simon, and when she sleeps her dreams are full of snow and that crown and mushroom clouds. She wakes up sometime later in a cold sweat (she was surprised to find that she still sweat the first time she woke up like this), terrified and shaking when the boat jerks violently.

The man shouts something that sounds like 'here!' but Betty isn't sure.

"We're here! Wake up, darlin'!" The man is laughing with joy when Betty walks out of her room on the ship, the blanket wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her dreams felt too vivid, too real, and it takes a few more moments before she can actually walk over to see him and get off the boat.

"Welcome to the Ooo-ess-ah."

"Ooo." She wispers. "USA."

"That's what I said," the man's brow furrows in confusion. After a moment, he shrugs. "The name herdly matters, Princess Bubblegum."

"Don't—" She goes to correct him, the first time since before the drops that she'd tried to correct someone. "That's me." She nods and looks up at the sky and the land stretching before her. "I'm Princess Bubblegum."


	4. Forget

Betty stops thinking of herself as Betty shortly after nearly-correcting the man from the boat. She's Bubblegum, Princess Bubblegum, and she should probably pick a new name but she doesn't care so much anymore. She's not a princess, and she's not Betty. Not anymore.

Bubblegum does find more scientists eventually, and doctors, too, and a few people who remind her of people she once knew. There's sentient candy here, but much less of it, and Bubblegum can't say that she's not okay with that. The giant talking candy is a bit off-putting, even though she's pretty sure she's at least somewhat insane by now.

She jumps and screams at even the slightest band or boom sound, and she wakes up a few times every night in a cold sweat, terrified to move or breath because _what if_'s are running through her mind, digging deeper at every turn.

She helps build things. She needs something to do besides wander around this island that was obviously hit but not as badly as other places. Within the first month of being there, Bubblegum takes up the job of helping plan and build houses and schools and the like for the population of weird candy beings and any mutated-human who didn't hide underground. Bubblegum has visited their utopia once. It was pretty and those down there were happy living in the caves. They didn't want to come to the surface, and Bubblegum wasn't going to force them to.

Her life becomes wake up tired, work, build, talk to fellow scientists, think of Simon, wonder how the world is doing, work, sleep, wake up after nightmares over and over again, and do it all over again.

Bubblegum's never liked falling into patterns, and now isn't any different. But she doesn't know what else to do.

So she builds, she talks, she continues on, because she's a survivor, and giving up is too easy.

Somewhere along the way, the candy people start taking the "princess" name seriously. She's seen as an angel of sorts to them, some of which used to be completely human like her. She didn't do much, only helped plan and helped build homes and walls to keep them safe, but they call her ruler and princess and a few call her queen, but she puts a stop to the latter one. She's a princess.

_Simon called me a princess._ That's what she would be. That's all she would ever be.

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><p>Any mistakes, tell me. I usually put this at the endbeginning of chapters but I haven't recently.


	5. Flee

Bubblegum is scouting the land when she first sees him. A man with blue skin and a long beard sitting on the snow and ice alone. He looks cold and lonely with the snow falling around him. Some of the candy people are with her, ready to help her create a map of this land. Royalties have been cropping up everywhere – whether they have land or the prince or princess, king or queen is just the holder of much power, be it magic or not.

They all take to calling it "Ooo". Bubblegum doesn't care so much about what they call it; it's still an island that suffered a horrible attack, an island she rules a piece of. Magic runs rampant. They call it 'The Return'. Bubblegum doesn't care – surviving the bombs was magic in itself.

Things are simpler than before, Bubblegum thinks. Things are different from when she was Betty. Things are a little more black and white, the island works a little easier than the world used to, and now she doesn't have to worry about bombs. She has to worry about demons and wolves and her people being attacked by them, but she doesn't have to think of bombs or dying. Dying isn't such a huge possibility anymore; it's as present in her life now as it was before the attacks, before even the mentions.

Bubblegum stops and watches the man for a moment, sympathy welling inside her. She can't tell if he's just there because he can be, or if he's lost, or given up.

She moves to walk over there, to talk to him. He glances up at her and grins.

She stops cold. A smile isn't out of the ordinary when people see her, but she's never even heard of him. The smile looks like he's seen a long-lost friend or relative, almost like he knows her.

There is something familiar about him, but she's never seen a man with blue skin and solid white hair before anywhere around Ooo.

"That's the Ice King, Princess." One of the younger candy people tells her quietly, sounding scared. "Some say he's crazy."

Bubblegum was about to ignore her and speak to the man anyways when she noticed the crown sitting on his head and suddenly she was cold down to her bones, not from the snow around her but because she _knew_ that crown. She'd seen it before.

"_Oh, try it on Simon." Betty giggled.  
>He laughed and did so, smiling at her. "Will you marry me, my princess?"<br>"I've already said yes." She reached for his held out hand and squeezed it. "I love you—"_

His entire body had relaxed at that moment, but it didn't feel as if he _relaxed_, more like passed out. Bubblegum puts her hand over her heart, trying to quiet the pounding. She feels like Betty again in that moment, watching, horrified, as her fiancé stood up, slouched over, his eyes mad. She half expects this blue man to start screaming the same things that Simon did, about visions and death and dying, about dark clouds and how Betty would die.

_Simon gripped her arms tightly. She tried to pull away, certain she'd have bruises there later. "Betty will _die_, don't you see? B-but not if she's frozen, not if she freezes—we'll put you back together, darling, don't you see?"_ _His expression was horrifying. His face was a mix of glee and terror and overall insanity. This wasn't the man she knew. He dissolved into screaming laughter, releasing her arms. Betty stumbled backwards, terrified._

"_Don't you _see_, Betty? We have to _die_ to _live_!"_

It can't be the same crown, she tells herself. That crown was left across the ocean with Simon, far, far away. Simon is dead, probably killed by the bombs. (Or maybe the magic – a few candy people and mutated humans tell her that uncontrollable magic had killed many people, too.)

She quickly decided to stay and speak to him, to ask if they can travel through his kingdom in the coming days and map it out instead of running. He wasn't Simon. And who would've grabbed a crown buried under the rubble that their home used to be?

"Mister Ice King," Bubblegum says calmly, watching him.

"Hee hee hee. Morning, Princess." It's actually late in the afternoon, but the princess doesn't correct him. She tears her eyes from the crown.

"We would like permission to map out your territory." She says with a steady voice. She doesn't like the look in his eyes. He's not really looking at her or any of them – it seems as if he's staring past them. He seems oddly friendly, besides, so Bubblegum resists the urge to just walk away.

"What?" His face falls. "I don't need a map."

"It's not for you." Bubblegum snaps. "It's for the history of Ooo. For the travelers and adventurers."

"They're not allowed _here_!" He gestures around him, referring to the ice and snow falling around him.

"We won't take anything. We just want—"

"No!" The Ice King crosses his arms over his chest, and then something seems to click in that head of his and he blinks. "I know you."

"No, this is the first time we've met." She sighs. "I hope you'll rethink letting us map your kingdom, but for now, we have to leave." She turns around and starts to make her way through the snow back towards the warm land, intent on ignoring this strange man and his crown that dug up all sorts of things she didn't want to think about.

"B-but, Betty! Wait!"

She freezes, her blood (if she has any, anymore. It might just be sugar running through her veins. She decides to test that hypothesis later.) turning as cold as the snow around her. No one's called her Betty in years. That isn't her name anymore.

It echoes in her ears. _Betty_. Her name. Her old name. It's not her name any longer.

But she's not going to flee like a coward. Her mind is a jumble. How can this man know her real name? "I'm not Betty." She says, her voice steady. "I'm Princess Bubblegum."

_I haven't been Betty for so many years._

None of the candy people ask her why he called her Betty. They think he's just crazy. He probably is – and Bubblegum finds a little comfort in that.


End file.
